Messiah
by Donatien Valiarde
Summary: 'Before now, before death, she has never seen the stars.' Shepard comes to terms with death and with what she has done. Oneshot, FShep/Garrus.


**Messiah**

* * *

Death—death is not as she thought it would be. Should be.

Scarlet clarity. The cosmos in its wholeness, its completion, stretching before her, past her, through her, sharp and crisp and cold. Like a brilliant morning, early Earth-winter, bracing and radiant and fathomless; intense skies and sheets of spectral white that shimmer, alive and eternal, spreading beyond every horizon, though she has never experienced this for herself. Yet this is death, and this is the comparison that she draws in death, though she knows that this is wrong. There are no horizons here, can be no horizons here. Only everything, everything all at once.

She has been here before, has she not? Once before. Already once too much. But she doesn't remember what it was like then, and this is not what she expects it would have been, would be now.

Before now, before death, she has never seen the stars.

Has never laid on a midnight beach, remote, away, body molded into warm powder sand, bare flesh seafoam-cooled, a whispering summer breeze whose gossip is of brine and sweat and the sweetness of green dune grasses. Has never laid there with her hands pulled behind her head as a prop as she stares beyond self and atmosphere and being—to the untold dusting of light in the taut black canvas above her, deep and scattered and boundless past imagining—and thinks about the insignificance of life, of herself, in the grand scheme of things. If there is a grand scheme. If there was, had been. But there wasn't, isn't, she knows that now.

We should try it anyway, the two of us, when it's all over—

Insignificance. She wishes she could believe this. She wishes she could experience this.

—Should try it anyway, somewhere warm and tropical, just us, and stare into nothing and care about nothing. And think about fragility and fleeting time and the flicker of our candle-flame lives, and take what is left for us, for us.

She has never seen the stars because she carries them—carried them—on her own shoulders.

She stands at the edge of existence and holds up the heavens, enduring as long as the crippled, blue-stained ruin of her will endures; celestial axis, the bridge that holds the continuum in the balance, the sword that cuts the head of the serpent eating his tail. She never asked for this. But it is she who must. She bears that weight, even if it means that she cannot crane back her neck to see what it is she carries.

She wonders, vaguely, if she did what was right.

The paths were open, and she had to choose. Three of them: death or death or death. Had to choose.

Didn't she?

–What if I _choose_ not to believe in your solutions? What if I choose chaos? What if I choose not to choose?

No, you must—no, I mustn't. I won't. Won't.

Did she have a choice at all, ever? Where is self-determination in doom, she wonders. She wonders if it was worth it.

Must. Must choose—I came here to—

To destroy, to create, to save.

She rolled her stone to the summit, stood at the apex and watched as it rolled back down. It rumbled, plummeted, shook the ground beneath her feet, gaining speed; she stood and stared and knew she must roll it up again when it hit the bottom, thinking all the while of how she might trap it here next time so that it could not fall again.

Humanity's darling, isn't that right? Survivor of Akuze, first human Spectre—but what does that matter now? Determiner of fates and purveyor of extinction. Too many microscopic, immensurable lives—each a self-contained universe, invaluable—hanging on her every breath, billions, trillions, now and forever afterwards, all congregated into her palm, suspended and waiting on what she says and does and picks. She carries the stars on her shoulders, but she is, was, but flesh and blood and bone. She drips out her life when she is cut, her tissue is soft and yielding and easily burst, her skeleton is brittle and frail—with enough pressure, enough force, enough weight, she is crushed and gone and no more.

And this time, this time the weight on her shoulders was too much for her to bear.

She craves the honeyed taste of air, to fill her lungs with it, feel the expanding of her chest, a throb, the grateful tremble of oxygen-soaked vessels: the sensations of a system, perfectly functioning, wholly taken for granted till the moment it's snuffed out. Sensations of life, of living, but her body is no longer her own; it's been scorched to cinders and sprinkled into the vacuum. Only her consciousness remains to her, and maybe not even that, for long—it's hers for now, returned to her in that flash of vermilion clarity. Hers and only hers, unless there comes a moment at which it too must break. She snatched the pieces back and fit them all together, hastily, in place, back where they belong. And then she saw, saw for the first time.

Where—

Alone. There is no answer to where she is. She is alone. Wasn't supposed to be this way.

She focuses her shattered mind of this fact, focuses on those that she thinks should be here, on those that she thinks shouldn't be here, on her own demise. When she took that first step on her fractured leg, gun poised and aimed, she was alone. Alone, she fired the first shot, muscles of her throat constricting convulsively as she took another step, split marrow crunching and blood bubbling and flames spouting. She choked back her sob, alone, and fired again, alone, and reached out, pleading, for the too-many lives that she must extinguish to do what she thinks she had to do. Shouldn't have had to do. Alone, she watched the galaxy glow, the Citadel heartlike and hemorrhaging and horrible; she watched a race against all possibility and gazed with hope and hopelessness at palm fronds and crescent-moons.

Should have been on the ground, at the head of the troops that she has gathered. Dust and blood, hot breath of explosions against her face and the screams of ship-wings slicing through raw air; the riot of a galaxy, gathered behind her, surrounding her, choosing—with her—entropy and doom and freedom to face that doom over the disgust of an imposed destiny. Should have been with them, the whole of the galaxy, the convergence of the living, innumerable individual entities—and the people she loves, the people for whom "friend" or "comrade" could never suffice, who have followed her down into the infinite, ever-darkening depths of hell, for whom she would gladly die if it would mean their survival.

Perhaps, then, it was best that she did this alone. They did not need to die alongside her, they could live on afterwards, and her own life was a worthy price if it meant assuring that fact—

But there is no bar here, is there? No heaven, human or turian or otherwise.

The realization seizes her in panic, the verge of hysteria, a red, red epiphany. In death, she is alone, staring into the cosmos in its wholeness, stretching before her. There is no one but her, not the people that she thought would be here, waiting; not even those she had hoped against reason not to find here. No one but her. Her and the everlasting uncertainty of what she has done.

She knows that there will be no beach after it all, no warm sand or the sea on a lazy, languid midnight with him—they will never joke about how big the universe is and how small and unimportant they are as they try together to count the stars. They will not listen to the seething surf crawling up the strand to find them, or laugh at how they have been forgotten and how quickly life has resumed its normality, its continuity, marching onward, deciding its own way forward as it always manages to do. She will not reach out to him in answer to his wry quip, finding him there next to her and taking advantage of how the living have left their saviors behind, exploiting and relishing their aloneness, their togetherness.

If this is what death is, how will she keep her promises to him? How will she stay with him for his remaining days, assuring that he is never alone? When he has joined her in death, how will she ever know? How will she find him when he leaves his own body behind, as she has?

In death, there is no one but her, no heaven, no hell, no one waiting to meet her, no one else—only her.

Maybe he is already dead, she thinks. Maybe he is elsewhere, waiting for her but never to find her, with the other lives she has ended, the other blazes of existence she has doused. Perhaps this is her merit, her punishment, her hell. For what she has done. For what she could not avoid. For what should never have happened.

She doesn't want to be alone. But she has sacrificed herself for despair.

She delves into her consciousness for something, some succor, anything to dull the edge of her anguish, to hold and cherish and pass the rest of eternity. What she finds there simply whets grief's blade. Scenes of herself, the progression of a pitiless slideshow: her parents, her childhood companions, her perfunctory acquaintances, their shrieks, their butchery, her guilt-ridden flight from the colony. Early years in the Alliance, Akuze, the trauma that she beat down and hid as she was thrown into the limelight, humanity's hopes and ambitions piled upon her, burying her, then those of all life after that. Eden Prime, Spectre, Saren and Sovereign; her death, her rebirth, a mission in which she had once again resigned herself to death. The friends that have fallen, the people that have looked to her for answers and redemption and salvation, the peace she has won and the annihilation she has wrought. And then—and then—

A different memory imposes a demand, a coup, taking dominance in her awareness.

Her last moments as herself.

The fraction of an instant, stolen for herself and for him under the blinding glare of the duty yet awaiting them, a selfish need that they both shared. She took him by the hand, guided him into the shadow of that glare, where together they could hide from obligation for a blink of time and fantasize about what-ifs that they both knew would never, could never be. The ghost of a tremulous smile, the crack of her voice, the feather of a touch, too short.

Those moments broke her, but they sustained her, sustain her even now. Those charged moments, frantic and desperate: the heat of his body—of which each ridge, each contour is now so familiar, so known to her, the old fumbling foreignness replaced by a sense of her own fierce, intimate possession—the rough smoothness of his mouth against her skin, the ringing of her pulse—vivifying—through every corner of her being. Those are the moments in which she believed that she truly understood what it was, what it would be, to live; to be apart and detached from the myriad, numberless expectations and pleas upon her, to live belonging only to herself and to him in the way that he belongs to her. It was only there, her time with him, pressed against him, their limbs and beings entwined, that she ever knew safety, normality, constancy, belonging.

But the choice she had made—and the choice he had made alongside her—was sacrifice. Sacrifice so that others may have, may own, what the two of them had known together, however transient it may have been, may be. There was, is, no her without him; and she and he had put themselves and their what-ifs aside, and together they had raised, adopted the incredible weight of deliverance for everyone but themselves; him helping to lift that burden onto her shoulders, carrying it with her for as far as he could.

—was worth it, wasn't it? Not in vain, not despair. The guarantees of chaos, its rife potentiality, its hope.

It was worth it, she tells herself. It had to have been. She cannot make herself believe in nothing.

Drifting, she feels a nagging sense of something overdue, an inkling of something that has waited but that can wait no longer. She turns, and the glimmer of the cosmos and the stars that she has just come to know fades away, perishing.

She meets a waste in its wake: black sphere splintered with crimson fissures, dusty, miserable, smoldering. Lifeless and bleak, but a cradle of possibility. It draws her in, tugging her, compelling her. As if the planet itself is pulling her in on itself—back into its own atmosphere, dragging her, increasingly faster and stronger, as it looms greater and closer in her imaginary vision. As she reenters its realm, she knows she is not simply falling towards it; the power is greater than gravity alone, she is catapulted, ripped back into existence.

In the sullen gray gloom, she sees her own shell, hung over a stone, tangled and mangled in a pile of rubble, the carcass of an urban desert, solitary and desolate. Rust-toned puddle, filthy and congealed; one of her legs, crushed, bent at an unnatural angle; deep, trickling gashes that have yet to dry; disintegrated armor and dangling metal tags that quiver and clink. Her body greets her rediscovered presence mercilessly, but appreciatively, with brutal, devastated, ineffable pain. Her brain, reunited with her, jolts and numbs, unable to comprehend the damage done to her—instead, it concentrates on the thin, withering pressure within her ribs and the grisly, dirt-clotted rawness of her throat.

She gasps, and blackens.

* * *

**Author's Notes:**

Like thousands of others, I've spent the past two months grappling to come to terms with the ending of Mass Effect 3, the conclusion of a series that I have deeply cherished over the years, whose characters and world and story I have come to greatly admire and love. While I know we still have the Extended Cut in which to stake our hopes, I needed some therapy and a way to negotiate my own feelings about the ending…But at the same time, I wanted to try not to contradict canon or anything that may show up in the EC. So I took a stab and wrote this.

Thank you for taking the time to read it. Any and all feedback is greatly, greatly appreciated.

(I know it doesn't really need to be said, but here is a disclaimer anyway: Clearly I do not own Mass Effect or its characters, otherwise, I assure you, I would have written a different ending to this series.)


End file.
